Rime Wants To Be Like Ico And Journey, But Doesn’t Earn It

Look at a screenshot of Rime. Any screenshot. Take in the swirling colors, the vast oceanside vistas, the stark, mysterious ruins. It’s all distinctive, and yet somehow familiar. Rime wears its gaming influences on its sleeve, but it lacks their heart. Rime, an exploration-focused puzzle game that releases on PC and PlayStation 4 tomorrow, tries hard to conjure up a very particular sort of melancholy interspersed with moments of wide-eyed wonderment. You’ve got your sprawling, ruin-dotted nature-scapes on one side, your sparse piano that builds to semi-regular crescendos on the other, and a lone child character smack in the center of it all. You spend your time exploring (though ultimately being funneled through) semi-open locales and solving puzzles. There’s no violence. You can jump, roll, pick up objects, and sing (which usually activates things). The story is if anything perhaps a bit too minimal. Nobody talks, and you try to piece together what’s going on from environmental cues and the occasional cut scene. The influences here are clear: Ico, Journey, and Zelda, in that order. Heck, you even spend part of the game chasing down a character who looks almost exactly like the main character of Journey. It’s, uh, pretty on-the-nose. Games can still be great even when they’re derivative, and Rime does some things well. Thus far, I’ve haven’t encountered any puzzles that really challenged me, but a handful made me go, “Oh, that’s neat!” There’s a wide variety of them, too, and they encourage you to tease out… [Read full story]